The invention relates generally to catheters, and more particularly to catheters including identification systems that enable the catheters to be specifically identified by the electrophysiological (EP) and other recording or mapping device or system to which the catheters are connected during studies or monitoring of patients.
Catheters are used in an increasing number of medical procedures to evaluate various conditions of the patient with which the catheter is utilized. As a result, there are many different configurations of catheters that are constructed for use in the procedures.
While many different configurations of catheters can be utilized for a particular procedure, the exact configuration of the catheter in use must be identified to or by the recording or mapping device to which the catheter is connected in order for the device to correctly receive or transmit signals in the procedure using the selected catheter.
To identify the particular catheter and its configuration to the associated recording or mapping device, prior art catheters have employed electrically alterable erasable programmable read-only memory (EPROM) chips or other suitable electronic storage devices directly within the construction of the catheter to contain an identity tag associated with the particular catheter and it configuration. On connection to a compatible recording or mapping system, the memory chip can be accessed by the device to provide various information stored about the individual catheter, such as the catheter type and manufacturer, as well as the total time the catheter has been in use, as recorded in the memory chip. Using the information on the chip, the device or system can determine whether the catheter is compatible with the device for the intended procedure, as well as to reject a reused or reprocessed catheter that has exceeded a use threshold.
Other prior art solutions to this problem involving disposable catheters use radio frequency identification (RFID) tagging within the catheter to identify and provide use information on the catheter to the system when connected to the system.
In each of these prior art identification systems, while the EPROM chip and RFID tag provide the desired information about the catheter to the recording or mapping system using the catheter, these system require significant increases in complexity and expense to manufacture the catheters with these devices. Further, the recording and mapping systems with which these catheters are used must also be capable of identifying and receiving the information provided by the EPROM chops and/or RFID tags for the catheters to be recognized. As such, prior art EP recording and mapping system require that the catheter configurations be made physically by the user through a manual interface of the EP system
A more simplistic prior art solution for identifying a particular catheter is to provide the particular catheter with a keyed connector having a color code thereon to identify the catheter. However, this solution is difficult to utilize based on wide range of catheters currently in use. Also, this solution again requires that the physician or other individual manually input all of the information provided about the catheter by the color code into the system, requiring a significant amount of additional time and effort.
Accordingly, it is desirable to develop a passive system for the identification of the relevant information about a catheter to a system to which the catheter is connected for use in a medical procedure. The identification system should allow either manual identification of the catheter at the input connection, or automatic configuration on connection of the catheter to the system. When the catheter information can be detected by an associated recording or mapping system, the system can operate using a catheter configuration basis instead of or in addition to a classical study configuration method.